Doctors
researching infection came along and we work-shopped what could be
done. One idea was to use mobile phones to allow doctors to quickly
report cases, which could then be mapped in near real time. Currently,
in most countries, cases of reportable diseases are communicated on
paper, which could days, or weeks, to get from an outlying clinic to the
national department of health, by which time the disease could have
spread widely.

Members of the Sahana Software Foundation, who
work on free open source humanitarian software, are now looking at how
to produce such a tool.